Major, Minor, Mirga

Following Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s announcement that she will step down as Music Director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra at the end of the 2021-22 season, there has been a small flurry of panic. Is this another artistic flight from the UK following Brexit? Is she also fed up with the apparent indifference to the arts on these islands? Intrigued by this youthful and brilliant conductor’s decision I thought it might be good to dig a little deeper and see if this was in fact what she meant. It turns out that she isn’t actually going anywhere - merely stepping back from some of her duties - and it is worth looking at her statement in full:

‘This is a deeply personal decision, reflecting my desire to step away from the organisational and administrative responsibilities of being a Music Director at this particular moment in my life and focusing more on my purely musical activities. I have such admiration and great fondness for the musicians of the CBSO and I am absolutely delighted that we shall continue to make music together in the coming years.’

To be clear, Mirga is 34 and has two children under two years old. Her rise as a conductor has already been meteoric and she has made what seems to me to be the perfectly reasonable decision to cut out the bits of her job that she doesn’t have much inclination for and to concentrate on the areas she really loves; making great music with wonderful musicians. Why wouldn’t she do this? There were a couple of (male) commentators who saw this as a slippery slope, and - coupled with another who in the same week described the (very much wanted) pregnancy of an opera singer as a ‘baby disaster’ made me question how far we have come. Excuse me, but I thought we were in the twenty first century? Are we now not in a world where women and their contribution to society and the arts is celebrated and supported? I assumed (perhaps naively) that the workplace is now one where lifestyle choices are respected and supported because people work better when this is the case.

In a previous post it was mentioned that arriving as an eighteen year old at Music College, I was unclear about what I wanted to do; just having a nice time was sufficient for my student brain. In this fuzzy-headed muddle however I was fairly sure of two things; I wanted to work in music for a long time and I wanted plenty of variety. I have so far achieved the second part of this (with all the obvious caveats of ‘master of none’) and it is too soon to comment on longevity. Fast forward a couple of decades and I had two children in quick succession and was more exhausted than I have ever been. In fact I’m not even sure I knew the concept of tiredness until my babies were born and I’m fairly certain other parents will empathise with that beaten-up aching body that comes with chronic fatigue. But the point is this; what got me through it was an overwhelming and fierce sense of love. The intensity of it had not been felt before and I was a lioness looking after her cubs with a ferocity that startled me. I neither knew or cared about much else - including career - and I loved it. This was completely startling; until this point I hadn’t been broody, assumed that the tediousness of childcare chores would be something I would want to get over and done with and thought my offspring would interest me more as they got older. As the majority of my income was through teaching, I decided to put that on the back burner until I felt ready to start working a little and things went from there. ‘But what about money?’ I hear you reasonably ask. Let me be blunt; we were broke. And gloriously - I didn’t give a shit. I figured that my babies wouldn’t care how much money we had and that we would sort that out when they were older. Without ignoring all responsibilities, this is more or less what we did and now (believe me) they care about money. Oh yes.

Anyway, amongst all this mother-earth hippy crap I felt secretly pleased that I had gone down the ‘variety’ route rather than the alternative; it meant that bits and pieces of work could be picked up as and when, and jobs could be discussed according to family needs. It turns out that I was more ahead of my time than I can ever pretend to be in control of. Here's the thing; we are told that anybody under about sixty can forget about the generous retirement packages of the current set of pensioners and the young will probably work for years before they can consider buying their own property. Workplaces will have to be more flexible, ‘portfolio’ careers will become the norm and almost no-one will stay in the same job for the whole of their career. Estimates are that most will have to work until they are at least seventy and indeed, the concept of ‘retirement’ may not even exist at all; it may well be that people will simply work less as they get older. Given all of this, it could easily be the case that we will be working for fifty years. Those in the arts probably won’t be shocked by this thought and others may look at totally new second or third phases in their working lives. We have to learn to think differently, have newer, shallower trajectories and include creativity as much as possible in our calculations.

So to return to Mirga, it is joyous to me that she is so musical, so brilliant and has already ‘added value’ to the CBSO. It is also joyous to me that she appears to have taken the decision to cherish that precious never-to-be-regained time with her children. She is 34 for heaven’s sake and even if she was to take ten years off would still be returning to work in her early forties. That would give her another thirty years at least to enjoy her music making and to continue to keep us enthralled with her efforts. But remember this; Mirga the lioness and all other lionesses - with or without cubs - need to roar, flex their muscles, stretch and occasionally - sleep.

Uplifting music of the day: Leonore Overture No 3 - Beethoven. I wanted to pick something with Mirga conducting and this was a perfect example of her exuberance and the transparent quality she manages to get out of the band. Also, she clearly loves brass and percussion! No sshhhing of them or pained expressions when they give it some welly. How gratifying.

Contemplative music of the day: ‘Are you going with me?’ - The Pat Metheney Group. Talking of slower trajectories, this piece is a perfect example of a very slow buildup with deep, meditative music creation. Every one of the musicians on this album shows such supreme taste, but apart from Pat (guitar) I wanted to make a particular mention for Lyle Mays, following his untimely death last year. A very special musician and pianist who plays on this track with such impeccable phrasing. Long may his music live.